Divines – first look review | Little White Lies

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Divines – first look review

20 May 2016

Words by Ed Frankl

Close-up of a person in a red hooded garment, with a hand covering part of their face, set against a dark, moody background.
Close-up of a person in a red hooded garment, with a hand covering part of their face, set against a dark, moody background.
There’s shades of Céline Sciamma’s Girl­hood in Hou­da Benyamina’s stir­ring debut.

Two years after Céline Sciamma’s Girl­hood, anoth­er girls-in-the-hood dra­ma has become the talk of Cannes. This a more row­dy, bois­ter­ous ban­lieue-set film, with a more youth­ful edge, and a dyna­mite cen­tral per­for­mance that’ll make up for inevitable quib­bles about its nar­ra­tive flaws.

Hou­da Benyamina’s debut film cen­tres around Dou­nia, a teenage mal­con­tent ener­get­i­cal­ly played by her younger sis­ter, Oulaya Amam­ra. She lives in a Roma camp beneath a motor­way with her alco­holic moth­er, chas­tised local­ly as bas­tard” for her mixed-race her­itage. She rarely attends school, and embraces the chance to work as a run­ner for a drug deal­er, Rebec­ca (Jis­ca Kalvan­da), in the neigh­bour­ing estate. With her wise­crack­ing side­kick Maimouma (an ebul­lient Déb­o­rah Luku­mue­na), she dreams of trips to Thai­land and dri­ving Fer­raris with the cash she’ll earn, but these dreams are hope­less­ly opti­mistic in a part of Paris where kids will be lucky to end up with a job at all.

Much like Karid­ja Touré’s Marieme in Girl­hood, Dou­nia search­es for respect in a world that’s antag­o­nis­tic towards her. Her Saint-Denis estate is not just a cen­tre for drug deals and pover­ty, it’s also a reli­gious cen­tre, and she seems to long for the kind of clo­sure that her Mus­lim faith should pro­vide (“When you’re God, you have respon­si­bil­i­ty”). But it’s in the the­atre that she finds a strange sort of answer, where she meets a dancer from the streets (Kévin Mis­chel); her attrac­tion to him seems both erot­ic and a long­ing for the dream he’s some­how achieved.

Oulaya is bril­liant as Dou­nia, soul­ful and vul­ner­a­ble in one scene, cre­ative and rest­less in the next (com­par­isons to Jen­nifer Lawrence aren’t amiss). You got clit, I like that!” screetch­es Rebec­ca when the first meets her, and Benyamina’s great­est strength as a direc­tor is an abil­i­ty to get the look and lan­guage of young girls in a hos­tile, mas­cu­line world. But the direc­tor is less able to jug­gle the var­i­ous tones and nar­ra­tive quirks. One joy­ous sequence has Dou­nia in an lav­ish dress try to seduce a drug king­pin to nick him of cash, descend­ing a night­club stair­case like a scene out of Scors­ese (with him it might have been The Rolling Stones on the sound­track, here it’s Azealia Banks). But a fol­low­ing scene is a scene of uncon­trol­lable violence.

Benyam­i­na might be point­ing to the volatil­i­ty of life in the ban­lieue, but scene-to-scene it doesn’t quite gel. But the film’s end­ing will remind view­ers of La Haine in its bit­ter metaphor for mod­ern France, yet the take­away from is a com­pas­sion­ate look at an under­class too often maligned.

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